GE Aviation Seeks to Automate Price Estimation for Defense Equipment With New Tool

General Electric’s aviation business developed a technology designed to speed up the production of pricing estimates for defense equipment and accelerate the acquisition process, Air Force Magazine reported Wednesday.

GE Aviation’s Brilliant Pricing system can reduce by 85 percent the time needed to come up with pricing estimates by applying artificial neural networks to historical pricing data. ANNs could help users predict the costs of parts-based prices a contractor or its suppliers paid for a specific component in the past.

The company used the Brilliant Pricing tool to conduct a price estimation for GE-built F110 engines for Bahrain as part of a foreign military sales program and compared it to traditional pricing estimates for Qatar.

The use of the tool facilitated the completion of the Bahrain proposal within 58 days, while the conventional price estimation for Qatar took six months to finish.

“And that was the first time we did it,” Karin Burns of GE Aviation said of the FMS pricing effort. “We believe we can now produce a proposal within 15 days.”

GE has informed contracting teams at Boeing about the Brilliant Pricing system as part of its effort to share the tool with other contractors.